Mike in the Wild

It's always an exciting moment when I'm outside and identify a bird for the first time.  Just this week I saw and photographed a green-tailed towhee at Phoenix' Desert Botanical Garden.  But a new find along with cooler desert weather weren't the only causes for excitement.  I soon realized that I had seen in my short time birding ALL the towhees that call the West their home. Spotted, canyon, California, Abert's and now green-tailed were all the birds in the region known as towhees and I had found and shot each of them.  They are all either in the genus pipilo or melozone, totaling thirteen living species in the Americas, five of which are found in the western United States and are now known by me.  There's a great amount of satisfaction knowing I can skim over my Western Peterson Field Guide's towhee page, not needing to analyze the details at length anymore. However on further analysis I discovered that towhees are in quite a large family of birds, t...

West of Prescott, where the city borders mostly National Forest, a network of trails and forest roads reaches deep into the wooded landscape.   But many people may not realize that one of the trails, part of the Javelina Trail #332 just south of Iron Springs Road, is the engineered pathway of an abandoned railroad line. The line goes back to the late nineteenth century, connecting the new mining town of Prescott to communities laying southwest like Skull Valley, Wickenburg, and eventually even Phoenix.  It also continued north, to Ash Fork, where it connected to Chicago bound trains.  It entered the area from the west over the steep Sierra Prieta Mountain Range between Granite Mountain and Thumb Butte, following part of what is Iron Springs Road before curving onto today's Javelina Trail for its entry into Prescott. This trail actually has an even wider reputation, being a restricted forest road when the forest service needs access for fire management.  Even more...

Start in Potato Patch and make a left on Yankee Doodle Trail.  Those names sound more at home in a television satire on country living than they do in mountain hiking.  But they are actually the directions that promise one of the most idyllic escapes for both the avid hiker and the experienced birder in the Prescott area. Dandrea Trail starts high in the Bradshaws, its trailhead nestled at the end of Poacher's Row in the summer community of Potato Patch.  It's Trail No. 285, beginning near groves of aspen trees that were starting to burst in their autumn yellows on my late September outing.   It cuts through thick woods of fir, oak and pine trees, and its rocky slopes are dense with grasses and wildflowers.  The ascent up Mount Union in Prescott National Forest is not terribly steep, but the pathway was an old miners' road, and has since been covered in large, protective stones.  This makes for a rough hike, so it's best to leave the running shoes at home...

It's a spooky name for a heavenly hike.  But I suppose whenever you walk across a sandstone bridge that's open on all sides, weathered, trodden and cracked, soaring many feet over a canyon, there's a sense you're letting the devil - or at least a madman - take the wheel. Devil's Bridge Trail (Trail 120 in Sedona) is actually a relatively easy hike with a modest elevation change.  It's only steep in a few, short sections as you climb to both the bridge and several amazing overlooks.  Natural but seemingly carved or stacked steps make it a steady and manageable ascent.  The biggest obstacle (or maybe it's a blessing) is the almost impassable forest road that lead to the trailhead.   It's FR 152, off of Dry Creek Road, and it's steep, rocky and rutted.   Like many hikers, I finally gave up the idea of driving to the trailhead and parked my not-quite-high-clearance-enough 4Runner to hoof it instead.  In this case, it almost doubled the hike's dista...

"Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play..."  The words of this classic poem and later folk song conjure romantic images of the American West and its limitless beauty.   But the antelope the author references is actually a pronghorn, mistakenly compared to the Old World animal it so closely resembles. But interestingly, the pronghorn is the fastest land animal after the cheetah in Africa.  But why did it evolve to run so fast from predators that are not a risk to them?   Most likely, it's a trait that served their ancestors well before an American cheetah species went extinct some time during the Pleistocene.  Its later fate would be tied to that of the buffalo, where over-hunting and range exploitation would come close to dooming it, but where later conservation efforts would assure recovery. Several years ago I was lucky to discover that pronghorns are not only native to Arizona, but still populate the state.  Whi...